Easy way to verify your Time Zones switch properly for DST

(imported topic written by BenKus)

March 11th is rapidly approaching and probably most people have applied the daylight savings time patches that are needed… but when next Monday rolls around, it would be good to see if your computers are showing the right timezones.

Here is a simple, but hopefully effective, method of verifying time zones:

  • Create a property called “TimeZone” that has the relevance:

local time zone

Now you will have a property that shows the timezones of all your computers. On March 12th, you can take a quick look at this list to try to spot problems.

Hope that helps…

Does anyone else have any good ways to create properties to verify time zones are correct?

Ben

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

I suggest checking to be sure that your computers will obey the DST settings.

If the following value is set to 1, then the computer will not adjust for DST.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation

“DisableAutoDaylightTimeSet”=dword:00000001

If the value either does not exist or is set to 0 the computer will adjust for DST. We had a few hundred machines that had all the patches, all had the correct time zone entries, but had been told not to adjust for DST.

Oops. Simple to fix by setting the above registry value to 0. I don’t think it even requires a reboot, although I restarted them just in case.